


in the dark (all cats are gray)

by voksen



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Body Shots, Canon Era, Drunk Sex, F/M, Kink Meme, Other, Roleplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-11
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-05 00:55:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voksen/pseuds/voksen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grantaire and Eponine get drunk and have sex while roleplaying as Marius and Enjolras, respectively.</p><p>Based on two kink meme prompts:<br/>Eponine, Grantaire, body shots.<br/>&<br/>Eponine/Grantaire: They commiserate over a bottle one night and end up having sex, each fantasizing about the ones they really want in order to get off.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the dark (all cats are gray)

He had begun with wine, which was as good a place as any to begin and a better place than most to go on from - if one happened to be sitting alone, waiting for someone interesting to turn up and making idle conversation with oneself and occasionally with anyone else who happened nearby. Still, as morning turned to afternoon and steadily dragged onwards from there and none of his friends seemed inclined to put in an appearance, the wine lost its fleeting charm and Grantaire turned to absinthe and to food.

The food arrived first, which might have been dubious if he had not been there all day; even he had to eat sometime, after all, and they had no doubt been keeping it ready for him. He finished the wine while he picked at it, then turned gladly to the absinthe when that arrived, bottle, cup, water-jug and sugar bowl laid out before him like armies before a general.

He poured generously, admiring the color and anticipating the flavor; the door opened and he looked up in interest.

At first he thought it was no one he knew, but as she stepped inside, looking from empty table to empty table, he recognized her: the girl who followed Marius about with hunger plain in her eyes - and no doubt lurking elsewhere, too. Did he know her name? He had never spoken to her, and as far as he could remember Marius wasn't given to speaking _of_ her - but ah, no, he remembered; he had once heard him call outside to her, asking her to fetch something from his room that he'd forgotten to bring to the meeting. It had been a bit of an odd name.

But before it came to mind, Grantaire, who had been idly sifting through the sugar bowl for a lump of the perfect size and had at last come up with a suitable one, found that by some impossible mischance they had neglected to give him an absinthe spoon. "Damn!" he said, and looked about; it was nowhere in evidence on his table or on any near him. He briefly considered the tines of his dinner fork as a possible, if remarkably inelegant solution, and near immediately discarded it: the green fairy deserved more respect than to be doused with the juice of second-rate fish.

At the sound of his exclamation, Marius's girl took note of him and wandered over. She was pretty enough, in a wild, feral sort of way, her chemise slipping interestingly low, her skirt a bit tattered, long dark hair sliding in messy locks and half-curls over appealing glimpses of shoulder. "Have you seen Marius?" she asked.

Her voice was rough, scratchy, and the whole picture was attractive in its very oddness: really, what was she doing hanging about Pontmercy? A maenad like her would do better chasing someone less... straight-laced, less awkward and less enamored of the trappings of empire. Like himself.

"No," Grantaire said, and as a thought came to him, gave her a second appraising look - Maenad, he'd thought? Maenad she could be; he would be Dionysus himself and, all others absent and unaccounted for, they could make do without Silenus. "Here," he said, offering her the lump of sugar, "come here and hold this."

She gave him a wary look, an alley cat confronted by a drunken, unpredictable hound. He grinned back. He might not be so charming as Courfeyrac nor so handsome as Enjolras, but it was only sugar in his hands, after all, and there was food and drink on his table; she looked like she got little enough of either.

Eventually she came as he'd thought she would; he passed her the lump of sugar, she took it with long, fine-fingered hands. He pushed his glass towards her and picked up the water instead, steadying it. She caught on quickly - no stranger to drinking, she - and held the sugar over the cup, watching him with purse-lipped interest. No doubt Marius had never asked such a thing of her, nor ever had occasion to think of it.

"Water without a thyrsus," he said, suiting action to words and dripping it slowly over her hand, tiny droplets to saturate the lump so that it would melt evenly through her fingers into the absinthe below. "You'll forgive the lack of tradition. Absinthe without an absinthe-spoon; it is a stunning lack. Unforgivable. And then again it is given to me that we may make a new one, you and I: a maiden with poisoned claws and water that clouds the jade. A fine picture; one could paint it and hang it in the palace. _Bassarids Leading the People_ \- that's a bit of romanticism for you. Let there be no talk of cockades and barricades; this new revolution is beets and wormwood and all the better for it. It is an idea worth having."

"Do you paint?" the girl interjected with bald curiosity.

"When I must," Grantaire said, weighing the color of his drink with an artist's eye and judging it worthy enough. "But there are enough poets to go around." He slid the glass from beneath her hand and drank hard: one swallow, then two, without a breath between them, until nothing was left but the bitter bloom.

She watched him drink, her hand still hovering over the table, glistening with water and pale leftover streaks of sugar. Grantaire, having set his emptied glass down, took it up - she startled and tried to pull away - and, bowing his head over it like a gentleman, kissed the sweetness from her thin fingers.

Her "What are you--" turned into a sharp, shocked little gasp as he loosened a last stubborn crystal free with the tip of his tongue and sucked it free before releasing her hand. She snatched it back to herself, cradling it against her breast, and for a moment Grantaire thought he was surely about to be struck at the least if not torn and rent into living bits in truth, a well-horned sacrificial goat.

But it seemed that she was neither Maenad nor maid; surprise faded quickly into calculation and instead of slapping him, she pulled the glass to her, refilled the dose of absinthe, and, sitting in the chair opposite him, pushed the sugar bowl pointedly towards him. "Here," she said, a challenge in her eyes and her voice, "hold this."

Grantaire laughed, half in amusement, half in the pleasure of unexpectedly discovering something unusual in the midst of an insufferably ordinary day. He took up a lump from the top, rather larger than the one he'd given her to hold, and held it up for her inspection.

"That's fine," she said, and so he held it over the cup while she took up the carafe in turn. It was no bluff, then, no tease; she was _wasted_ on Marius, and no mistake.

She poured slowly, cautiously, with an amusingly deep concentration, her lower lip bitten gently between her teeth; if she did not have quite so deft a hand for it as he did, well, by the look of her she'd had a decade's less practice. She was good enough, at any rate. It dripped slowly over his hand at first, building up to a gentle trickle almost like a caress, the sugar softening from stone to sand in his hand and then dissolving entirely, falling through his fingers like a dream of thick water to cloud the absinthe below.

She stopped pouring early, while there was still green flickering in the milky opal. Taking up the glass, she drank as deep as he had, as if she'd match him equally, her eyes never leaving his.

When she finished, Grantaire smirked and offered his hand; his fingers were coated front and back with wet melted sugar from the too-large piece he'd taken. She took his wrist, still watching him, lowered her head, and licked a stiff, pointed stripe from the tip of his middle finger slowly up through the sticky-sweet mess up to the heel of his hand, gentling as she reached it to finish with the soft flat of her tongue and a little beckoning flick. Before he had quite recovered from that she had ducked back down, again starting at his fingertips; this time her tongue curled about them, catching a drop of sugar-water just as it threatened to fall.

Grantaire swallowed, searching out the remnants of sweetness in his own mouth as she teased at him, her reddening lips brushing over his fingers again and again but never quite letting them inside, always turning, twisting away at the last possible moment. He couldn't help but imagine them elsewhere, imagine her breath hot over his prick instead of his wet palm, her quick clever mouth stretched wide around him - it showed in his eyes; the knowledge of it was reflected in her own like a mirror. Finally she let him in, her mouth just barely open enough for his finger to slide slippery between them, over teeth and tongue, her lips pressing tight around each knuckle until they met his hand. She suckled at it until he was sure there could be not even the idea of sugar left, her already thin cheeks narrowing, her tongue curling and curving.

And then she pulled away, his finger slipping free with a wet, hollow pop; she released her grip on his wrist and sat back, reaching for the bottle of absinthe and refilling the glass quite as if everything were perfectly normal. Instead of reaching for the sugar, however, she pulled his abandoned fish across the table, picking up the fork and digging in without the bother of asking.

He slouched in his chair and watched her eat his dinner; when she'd done, he tossed the napkin to her as well; there was, after all, still half a bottle left - and it was his turn.

 

* * *

 

Between them they had finished the bottle and the evening; Grantaire had learned that her name was Eponine and she had learned - whatever she had cared to learn from his talk, for she had listened, watching him with intent eyes, while matching him glass for glass. At some point an absinthe spoon had appeared as if by magic on the table when the clean plate disappeared; she had been the first to use it, moving sugar from bowl to silver and daring him with the tilt of her lips to object, to tell her to pay for herself one way or the other. He had not.

And somewhere in the dregs of the bottle it had become almost comfortable, almost companionable, despite the tension that lingered faintly between them like the tiny sticky patch on his wrist that her tongue had not quite reached. He had talked with her as he had become used to talking with his friends - of whatever came to mind and seemed entertaining enough to voice - instead of as he might have talked to any other woman, no enticements, no filters for good or ill. It helped that they were alone; that no one was watching him, guessing whether he would go home alone or not. He had felt, sometimes, that bets were laid and fortunes made and lost on the impossibility of his face, and had more than once thought of needling Bossuet into putting money against him to ensure his success rather than relying only on the many, varied gifts of his tongue.

But no one had come and, if she had not been there, Grantaire might have spent a lonely night of it before searching out something else to amuse himself with. Strange, to find himself in debt to Marius of all people, if even by such a circuitous distance. He clinked the spoon against the empty bottle, pondered calling for another: he was drunk, it was true, but he was not yet so drunk he could not stay awake, and it was not so late that they were in danger of being thrown into the street. The day was dead, but the night was young enough.

He looked up at her instead. She was leaning back, staring up at the ceiling more as if something there fascinated her than as if she simply preferred not to look at him, a vague smile on her lips, her eyes half-closed; an expression caught somewhere between boneless pleasure and sly amusement, the face of someone pleasantly drunk on someone else's money. It was a good look on her, he thought, and he said abruptly: "Why Marius?" without bothering to cloak it in harangue. It was curiosity only; she could have had better than a poor stubborn Bonapartist who was clearly besotted with someone else - by her looks alone, if nothing else.

Eponine rolled her eyes towards him without moving her head. "Why Marius what?"

"Why do you follow him about? Like a toy boat on the end of a string. That's well enough for a fountain, but in the ocean the string will snap, the boat will flee, and Ariadne will be left on the shore with her broken thread." And if he laughed at his own words, at himself, what of it? In wine there was truth; in absinthium there was art, and Ariadne was Dionysus' wife and his cuckold and she was slain by Artemisia.

It was a joke that Eponine did not share but did not need to share: her grin grew crooked and strange as he smiled, and she said "Why Enjolras?"

The laughter went out of him in a rush, a bottle corked by surprise. Eponine unwound herself from her lazy sprawl and leaned forwards onto the table towards him; her chemise dipped lower yet, her small breasts pale shadows in the dim light of the wineshop. Grantaire stared, transfixed. "It's not just Marius I watch," she said. "I know my way around all of you. I've seen you looking at him same's you look at skirts, but he's not kind to you."

"Should marble be kind?" Grantaire asked. "Shall all statues be Galatea and all rivers be born from blood?"

The details of this were also lost on Eponine, but the sense was clearly not. "You can find anyone to be cold to you for nothing much," she said. "But kind's rare."

"And anyone is anyone," he said. "And anyone is the most common of all."

"Anyone is anyone," she repeated, propping her chin up on her hand and looking at him with near as much interest as he had studied her before. "I s'pose it's true, what they say: at night, all cats are gray."

Grantaire's eyebrows shot up: this, he had not expected - doubly so, after she'd brought up Enjolras.

Perhaps she thought she saw a bit of Ariadne in _him_. And perhaps there was some, though he rather thought she'd prefer to find Marius in her bed rather than in his Mariette's, while Enjolras out of Marianne's arms would be Enjolras no longer. And yet --

"It would be a black night," he said, "before I mistook a quean for a tomcat."

"Maybe it's cloudy," she said. "We've been in here long enough you won't know less you look."

Maybe it was. And if it was not, what harm done but a few hours wasted? "All right," he said, standing and offering her his hand. "But if you'll have a gray cat for your Pontmercy, shall it call you Eponine or Emperor?"

 

As it happened it had grown cloudy while they had sat and drunk and the night was dark indeed, but Grantaire had traced the path between wine and bed so often that he could have walked it without misstep while twice as drunk and half-asleep.

Grantaire's apartment was small - he had little enough use for space and preferred to spend his money on more interesting things - and rather cluttered; papers here, clothing there, a haphazard stack of canvases near the easel in the corner for scratching at when the rent came due, a pile of rags beside them meant for cleaning brush and paint. While he was shutting the door behind them, Eponine's eyes fell on the latter; by the time he had finished with the lock and turned, she was sorting through them with interest.

He left her to her strange occupation, instead going to his bed and evicting a few books and a pencil or two that had gotten tangled into sheets and blankets; it had been some time since he'd slept with anyone but Racine for a night's company. When he turned back he beheld Eponine changed: her chemise discarded on the floor, her chest bound with long strips of cloth, flattening still more as she twisted and knotted with evidently practiced skill.

It was a metamorphosis. He sat down on the bed to watch with fascination. When she had finished, she picked one of his own shirts from the floor and swung it over her shoulders: it was comically large, but she rolled the sleeves, tied the tails and twisted the seams until it was a better fit than her own had been. Then, shaking out her hair and combing it back with her fingers, she tied it with a scrap of rag into a tail with some semblance to an old-fashioned queue.

"What do you think of the cat now, Monsieur Grantaire?" she asked, grinning crookedly at him and tucking her skirt up about her skinny legs in a mockery of pantaloons. "Is it gray enough for you?"

By candlelight she was no Apollo, but she might have passed for some godling's gamin, a Ganymede-of-the-street; in the night she might well have been a boy, even a man. "The cat is gray," he said, spreading his hands in surrender before snuffing out the candle, leaving only the faint light of the city outside leaking through the shutters of his garret window. "The night is cloudy, and Chevalier d'Eponine is right."

"When isn't she?" Eponine said, pitching her voice deliberately low, a hoarse whisper in the dark. Her footsteps were soft pads on the wood, as if she were a cat in truth instead of by metaphor alone. When she reached his bed she was little more than a shadow; she pushed him down onto it by his shoulders and climbed atop him.

He put his hand up to her waist to steady her there and his fingers brushed bare flesh at her hip, sharp bone and narrow curve - she'd lost the skirt on the way to bed without him seeing. "God," he said, and then was silenced by her mouth. She tasted of absinthe, but so did he, strongly enough that even sober Enjolras might have been drowned out by it.

She pulled away from him, her mouth slipping down over his cheek, nipping at his jaw, and said his name into his ear, aping at Enjolras's cool composure. It was a good enough approximation of a man's that Grantaire could almost imagine it _was_ Enjolras in his shirtsleeves pinning him down to his own bed. His head spun more from dreams than from drink; he slid his other hand up over her back to anchor himself. Enjolras would be so slender as this under his hands, he thought, slim and strong like a willow.

Eponine bit him again, just at his throat; hard enough to send pain slanting through his pleasant haze, hard enough to mark, and before he could object said in that same voice: "Take off your clothes, Grantaire. Let me see what you have to offer."

Then he would be himself first, as she willed it. It would take less pretense; it took hardly any at all to undo the buttons of his waistcoat eagerly as commanded, to shrug out of his shirt and push them aside, off the bed and onto the floor in a pathetic heap; to work at his belt next. To imagine Enjolras with himself was a sin, perhaps; to put Enjolras to bed with _Pontmercy_ was an absurdity.

Her hands were thin and hard and merciless on him, pressing against his ribs as he uncovered himself, turning to his shoulders, his arms, following in their path to his hands and then resting there as he unbuttoned the fall of his trousers. His cock was stirring to life already from promise and fantasy despite the drink; Eponine shifted down his body, her shins bracketing his thighs, fingertips still pressing into his wrists. "Touch yourself," she said, "show me."

Grantaire obeyed, wrapped his hand around himself; her fingers, tangling with his own, came along and pressed against his hardening flesh. He sighed softly with the pleasure of it and she echoed him, her breath shuddering slightly, almost breaking: Enjolras out of his depth at last. He pressed their joined hands closer, showed her the rhythm he liked, long tight-fisted strokes with a twist at the head, rippling the bands of their fingers over the ridge.

"Enjolras," he said, an admission, a confession, an entreaty.

He had meant to go on, to say - he did not know what, he had not thought so far ahead, when she answered: "Yes."

It was enough, it was too much. His hips trembled beneath their hands, between her bony knees; their fingers grew slick as they passed over his prick again and again; her finger disentangled from his just enough to smear fully across the head. Grantaire's head fell back against the pillow, his eyes shut so tight that stars bloomed behind them. "I want you-- I want to take you," he said, his voice as rough as hers.

 _"Yes,"_ she said again.

He groaned something that might at one point have held words and freed his hand, grasping her by the shoulders and tipping her off to the bed beside him; fumbled at the last remaining button and kicked out of his trousers altogether before rolling over and taking her in his arms again, kissing the boyish-smooth cheek, the corner of soft lips, then finding her tongue with his own.

She had turned her thigh between his legs, her hip canted at an angle away from him; he thrust against it gently and found himself having to stop kissing in search of air. "Come," he said, and rolled to his side, twisting her about so that she lay with her back pressed against his chest, his cock slipping slick and hard against the curve of her buttocks.

"How--" she said.

"Shh." He pulled her closer with one hand against the flat of her stomach, reaching down between them with the other; stroked his prick a few more times, knuckles close against her knobby spine, then guided it between her thighs. "Like this."

When he thrust against her she shivered, set her hand over his on her belly. She was wet to dripping, and when she realized what he was after and pressed her legs together for him, the tight sweet slick of it was almost unbearable. He thrust again and again, an uneven, uncontrolled rhythm, his mind racing desperately over Alexander and Achilles as he stifled words and sounds alike against soft curls that in the blessed darkness were neither black nor blond.

Eponine leaned back into him as if it pleasured her as much as it did him, her breath coming quick now as well, in sharp, harsh pants like a man on the edge-- she clenched her legs closer, arched her back against him, said _"Grantaire!"_ with a crack in her deep voice that opened beneath him like a chasm.

His hips jerked forwards again, once - twice more; his mouth slipped from her hair to her shoulder, but even the press of flesh was not enough to muffle Enjolras' name as he shuddered and spent, holding her as tight, as close as he could without shattering the fragile illusion.

It broke on its own, of course, crumbling beneath the suffocating weight of reality as soon as the last of the mindless, choking pleasure faded. He savored the memory of it, the sweet taste of the lie, pressing a kiss into the hollow of Eponine's throat in a thanks that even he could not articulate and loosing his bruise-tight grip on her hip and belly.

Her hand tightened on his, tugging it downwards. She did not say please; it hung unspoken in the air. Grantaire kissed her again and pulled away, then gently shoved her to her back against the mattress. "There, Eponine," he said, and heard a soft gasp in answer. What would Pontmercy sound like in bed? It was a question he had honestly never thought to contemplate. Awkward and embarrassing, no doubt, judging by the way he'd wandered about like a moonstruck calf lately, but that was hardly worthy of girlish fantasy.

He'd do the best he could, he decided, speak as little as possible, and let her imagination work to make up the difference. He pressed her back again and slid downwards, shifting up to hands and knees so that he sat over her as she had rode him earlier, then continued on. Ducking his head, he kissed her sharp hipbone, the crease of her thigh - she gasped again, her voice trembling far higher now than it had been when she'd been playing at Enjolras. He appreciated the difference, now it had been shown to him, and kissed again with a flicker of tongue to hear it a second time.

But he did not linger too long; he crawled down further, letting his stubbled cheek rasp against the outside length of her leg, teasing them both, until he could smell himself on her, salt and harsh. One last shard of illusion, he thought, and turned his tongue inwards, licking her clean, chasing every splash, every drop of his seed from her skin as he had earlier licked sugar from her fingers 'til his mouth was full and wet and she was gasping below him, her fists tangled in his hair and trying to pull his head closer.

Grantaire swallowed, a harsh, rough gulp, licked his lips _(Enjolras might taste so, if Grantaire had serviced him--)_ and then it was over, the last grain of dream-sand falling away; he kissed her thigh again, softly, like a lover, and she moaned.

Her hands were unexpectedly gentle in his hair for how long she'd waited - but no, Pontmercy would probably object to having his hair pulled, the more fool he. "Eponine," he said again, quietly, trying to gentle his tone and tame it to something sweeter.

And now - now that he was not himself, now she did say "Please," her thumbs falling from his hair, stroking over his ears, pressing just at the hinge of his jaw, and again: "please."

He turned his head, caught her hand; when he pressed a kiss to her palm, he tasted nothing but skin and salt. Without further words he turned back, ran his own hands over her thighs again, a long stroke up the outside to her hips as she shivered and spread them wider for him, then under the small of her back, beneath his shirt, and down again to cup her buttocks and lift her up to meet his tongue.

If her thighs had been slick, her cunt was soaked; his mouth slid easily over her, his tongue even more, and he drank her down like wine to keep from drowning. She made a strange, choking noise as he lapped at her, broad twists of his tongue meant to tease, to show what he could do without giving her what she needed; he pressed his face tight against her, thrust his tongue inside, and she moaned outright, a wordless, needy sound. "M'sieur--" she said; Grantaire licked at her again, lewdly, deeply, and turned his head so that his nose, his cheekbone pressed and rubbed against her, and " _Marius!_ " came out as almost a shriek.

It was not the first time someone had called him by another man's name in bed, but it was the first time he'd found it a compliment. He grinned, twisted back the other way, was rewarded with a buck of her hips and her legs crossed over his back. Shifting her down towards him more, he freed one hand from beneath her to follow the strokes of his tongue with two fingers: teasing at first before slowly slipping inside in shallow, curving thrusts, freeing his mouth to move up again.

And now he set to in earnest, touching first lips, then the tip of his tongue up above in stiff-pointed flickers; in a fit of whimsy, he traced out the text of _Farewell to the Old Guard_ although he knew the words would be unintelligible; all that mattered was the quick curl of his tongue, the press of his lips, the twist of his fingers inside her.

She rocked against him as he worked at her, deepening the thrusts of his fingers, pushing herself against his face, his mouth, her thighs tightening against the sides of his head. Her grip in his hair tightened only briefly, then slackened at once; she loosed her fingers and petted him instead, ruffling through his curls again and again, a desperation of gentleness.

 _Her happiness was my only thought,_ he spelled out; she writhed beneath him, back arching clear from the bed, hips bucking so that he nearly lost hold of her. Her breath came in wild pants of _ah_ and _Mm--_ that never quite finished until at last they ran together as she crested the wave. Even through the muffle of her thighs against his ears he heard that _"Marius!"_ , all monsieurs forgotten now - no doubt all his neighbors had heard it too, but he rather thought he'd escape the blame for it.

Giving up the lecture, he slowed his efforts, pressing harder but less quickly, helping her through it as she trembled against his mouth, clenched tight around his fingers; but he did not stop until her breathing slowed, the tremors eased themselves to a halt, and she fell back against the bed with a sated, shuddering sigh.

There were no thanks, no words; the illusion for her must have lasted no longer than it had for him. But she let her hand fall from his hair to his face, lifting it slowly from between her legs, her fingertips brushing over his cheek and down wet skin to his lips, pressing them into his mouth. He took them, as he had before, and gently sucked.

 

Eponine fell asleep not long after, turning half to her side and giving her back to him and the room, but Grantaire had been shaken out of his sated lassitude by the effort of bringing her off and found himself lying awake beside her, staring up into the darkness, thinking of everything and nothing. After half an hour or so he sat up, stretched, and re-lit the candle; she slept on without stirring. At some point her hair had fallen out of its queue and lay in a disheveled, tangled mess about her, hiding her face in shadow; his shirt, too, had come out of the neat folds she'd tied into it and fallen loose, covering her nearly to the thigh.

A beautiful boy no longer, he thought, shaking his head and standing: another drink or two would get him to sleep, surely. Halfway to his cupboard, the candle flickered and he looked back. She was still sleeping; it had been only a sudden draft, sending shadows flickering over her long, pale legs, the nape of her neck between her hair and his shirtcollar.

He took up the brush instead of the bottle.


End file.
